The Scorpio Races

by Maggie Stiefvater

Page 5

 

  He controls the horse like a fishing boat controls the sea. I see now that the other line is held by Padgett, an older man who should know better than to trust Mutt with his life. Next to me, I hear a soft sound in a moment between gusts of wind; I glance over and there is another of Mutt’s friends sitting against the rock wall where the cliffs meet the beach. He is curled around his own arms, and one of them he holds gingerly. It looks broken. The sound I heard was his whimper.

  “Get out of this, Kendrick!” Mutt calls.

  I cross my arms over my chest and wait. The horse has stopped struggling for the moment. Against the light chalk of the cliffs, I can see the trembling dark lines leading to the capall uisce. The horse is tiring, but so are the others. Mutt’s muscled arms mimic the shaking of the lines. The other men creep around, laying loops of rope on the beach, hoping the horse will step into one. It would be easy, for someone who didn’t know the water horses, to think that the capall uisce, standing there with its sides heaving, is defeated. But I see its head drawn back, predatory, raptor-like rather than equine, and know that things are about to get ugly.

  “Mutt,” I say. He doesn’t even turn his head, but at least I said it.

  The line holding the horse’s pastern suddenly stretches taut as the gray capall lunges toward Mutt. I am sprayed with sand and small pebbles from its hooves digging into the beach. Shouts punch the air. Padgett reels and tugs on his line, working to offcenter the horse. Mutt is too busy with his own welfare to return the favor. The line around its neck suddenly slack, the horse backs toward Padgett. Its hooves drag circles in the sand. And then the horse is on Padgett, teeth sunk into his shoulder, front legs reared up and embracing him. It seems impossible that Padgett will not fall to the ground under the weight, but the horse’s grip on his shoulder holds him upright for a brief moment before it falls to its knees, Padgett tucked beneath its chest.

  Now Mutt is hauling the line around the horse’s neck, but it is too little, too late, and what is he against one of the capaill uisce?

  Padgett is beginning to look improbable; something about him is starting to look less like a man and more like meat. I hear, plaintively, from one of the men: “Kendrick. ” I step forward, and right as I get to the horse, I spit on the fingers of my left hand and grab a handful of its mane at its poll, right behind its ears. Pulling a red ribbon from the pocket of my jacket with my right hand, I press it over the bones of the horse’s nose. It jerks, but my hand on its skull and neck is firm. I whisper in its ear and it staggers back, punching a hoof into Padgett’s body as it struggles to find its footing again. Padgett is not my concern. My concern is that I have two thousand pounds of wild animal being held by a string and it has maimed two men already and I need to get it away from the rest of them before I lose my tenuous grip.

  “Don’t you dare let that horse go,” Mutt tells me. “Not after all this. You bring it back to the stable. Don’t let this be a waste. ”

  I want to tell him that this is a water horse, not a dog, and that leading it inland, away from the nearly November salt water, is a trick I don’t feel like performing at the moment. But I don’t want to shout out loud and give the horse any more cause to remember that I am right next to it.

  “Do what you need to do, Kendrick!” yells Brian, who has finally made it down.

  “Don’t you dare let that horse go,” Mutt shouts back.

  Just to get them all out alive would be a feat. Just to get the horse down to the shore and release it far enough into the ocean that we could get away safe would be impressive. But I can do more than just get them away safe, and they all know it, Mutt Malvern most of all.

  But I whisper like the sea in the horse’s ear and take a step back from the roving flashlights. One step away from all of them, one step toward the ocean. My sock wicks the tide into my boot. The gray horse is trembling under my hands.

  I turn to look at Mutt, and then I let the horse go.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  PUCK

  I don’t think that I sleep, but I do, because in the morning my eyes are sticky and my blankets look like a mole has tunneled through them. The sky outside the window is the blue of almost-daylight, and I decide that no matter what time it is, I’m awake. I spend too long standing shivering in my sleeping top — the one with the straps of lace that are just a little itchy, but that I wear anyway because Mum made it — staring at the contents of my dresser, trying to decide what to wear to the beach. I don’t know if it will be cold after I’ve been riding for a while and I don’t know if I want to go down there dressed like a girl when Joseph Beringer is probably going to be there looking at me like hur, hur, hur.

  Mostly I’m trying not to think grandiose things like: You will remember this day for the rest of your life.

  In the end, I just wear what I always wear — my brown pants that won’t chafe and my chunky dark green sweater that Mum’s mother knitted for her. I like to think of Mum wearing it; it gives the sweater history. I look into my spotted mirror and make a fierce face under my freckles, my eyebrows straight across over my blue eyes. I look messy and cross. I pull some of my hair out of my ponytail, across my forehead, trying to look like someone other than the girl I grew up being. Someone people won’t laugh at when they see me arrive on the beach. It doesn’t work. I have too many freckles. I draw my hair back into the ponytail again.

  In the kitchen, Finn is already up, and he is standing at the sink. He is wearing the same sweater as yesterday, and he looks like a man who has shrunk in the night while his clothing pooled around him. Something smells sort of brittle and carbon-like, almost good, like steak or toast, until I realize that it’s actually a bad smell, like burned paper and hair.

  “Gabe awake?” I ask. I peer uncertainly into the cupboard, to avoid having to look at Finn. I’m not sure I want to talk. Looking in the cupboard, I’m not sure I want to eat, either.

  “He’s already gone to the hotel,” Finn says. “I … here. ” And with this, he sets a mug with a spoon standing in it down on the table. It’s got stains of whatever’s in it on the sides in such a way that I just know it’s going to leave a ring on the table, but it’s steaming and I suspect that it’s hot chocolate.

  “You made this?”

  Finn looks at me. “No, Saint Anthony brought it to me in the night. He was very put out I didn’t give it to you right then. ” He turns back around.

  I am shocked, both by the reappearance of Finn’s humor and the gift of the hot chocolate. I see now that the counter is an absolute mess of pots that Finn used to distill a single cup of cocoa, and I’m certain now that the odor hanging on the air is the smell of milk spilt on the hot burner, but it doesn’t matter in the face of his intention. It sort of makes my lower lip not quite sure of itself, but I clamp my teeth on it for a moment until everything’s steady. By the time Finn sits down on the other side of the table with a mug of his own, I’m normal again.

  “Thanks,” I say, and Finn looks uncomfortable. Mum used to say he was like a faerie; he didn’t like to be thanked. I add, “Sorry. ”

  “I put salt in it,” Finn tells me, as if this eliminates the need to be grateful.

  I try it. It’s good. If there’s salt in it, I can’t taste it around the floating islands of partially stirred cocoa. They dissolve in my mouth in not-unpleasant lumps of powder. I can’t remember if Finn has ever made cocoa before; I think he only ever watched me. “I can’t tell there’s salt in it. ”

  “Salt,” Finn says, “makes cocoa sweeter. ”

  I think this is a pretty stupid thing to say, because how could something not sweet make something sweeter, but I let it pass. I stir my cocoa and mash a few of the lumps of cocoa against the side of the mug with the back of the spoon.

  Finn knows I don’t believe him, though, and says, “Go and ask at Palsson’s, then. I watched them make the chocolate muffins. With salt. ”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t believe you! I didn�
��t say anything at all. ”

  He mashes a spoon in his own cup. “I know you didn’t. ”

  He doesn’t ask me how long I’ll be gone today, or how I’m going to get a horse to ride, or anything about Gabe. I can’t decide if I’m glad not to talk about it or if it’s driving me crazy that he’s not. We just slurp down the rest of our drinks, and when I get up to put my mug in the sink, I finally say, “I guess I’ll be gone most of the day. ”

  Finn gets up and puts his mug next to mine. He looks very serious, his neck skinny and turtle-like poking out of the oversize sweater. He points to the counter behind me. Among the wreck of pots and dishes is a cut-up apple, with a bit of crumbs from the counter stuck to one of the cut edges. “That’s for Dove. I want to come with you today. ”

  “You can’t come with me,” I say, without even stopping to think about how his words make me feel.

  “Not every day,” Finn says. “Just today. Just the first day. ”

  I battle momentarily with the image of myself emerging on the beach proud and lonesome, versus the reality of arriving with one of my brothers to watch from the sidelines and see how it’s done. “Okay. That would be good. ”

  Finn gets his hat. I get my hat. I knitted both of them myself, and mine is patterned in white and two different shades of brown. Finn’s is red and white. They’re lumpy, but they fit.

  In our hats, we stand among the wreckage of the kitchen. For a moment, I see the room like anyone else might see it. It looks like everything around Finn has crawled out of the mouth of the kitchen sink drain. It’s a mess, and we’re a mess, and no wonder Gabe wants to leave.

  “Let’s go,” I say.

  CHAPTER SIX

  SEAN

  That first day, Gorry has me come down to the beach before anyone else to try a piebald mare he has dredged from the ocean some indeterminate time before. He is so certain that I will want her for Malvern that he’s priced her high enough for two horses. Under the dark blue early morning sky, the tide just starting to pull back from the sand, my fingers frozen where they poke from my fingerless gloves, I watch him trot her back and forth for me. Her hoofprints are the first on the beach; the tide has wiped the sand clean, removing all traces of Mutt’s botched efforts the night before.

  She’s striking. Water horses come in every color that normal land horses do, but, like land horses, most are bay or chestnut. Less often dun or palomino or black or gray. It’s very rare to find a piebald water horse, equally black and white, sharp white clouds across a black field. But flashy color doesn’t win races.

  The piebald mare doesn’t move terribly. She has a good shoulder. Lots of capaill uisce have good shoulders. Unimpressed, I watch black cormorants spin through the sky above us, their silhouettes like small dragons.

  Gorry brings the mare to me. I hitch myself onto her back and look down at Gorry. “She’s the fastest capall uisce you’ll ever sit on,” he says in his grainy voice.